Good (free) ASP.NET components

I’m really struggling trying to find some good free ASP.NET components on the net. I’m a strong believer (and follower) of not re-inventing the wheel and will fully conceed to someone who has already gone through the pain and suffering of writing a module that did something simple, like a drop-down menu, calendar pop-up, etc. I love writing custom components, but in a crunch when you need to do an app I don’t have time to write a nice re-usable thing. Maybe after the project is finished but not as part of it. Too much of a hit on the momentum that you’re trying to achieve.

Right now I’m struggling to try to find a good tab navigation component. I like navigation through tab panels, as long as there’s only a few. Some good examples of sites that use the tab approach would be GForge, MSDN, and Experts Exchange. I’m currently building a simple ExtremeProgramming (XP) tool that would track stories, iterations, tasks, and show some metrics in an agile type project. There are a few tools out there, but some are overkill and this one needs so many dependant libraries and technologies that even my Linux box would have a hard time trying to run it. A tab panel would be great for that type of thing so each area is split up into a separate page and you can easily see what’s going on and access everything.

I did manage to hunt down the ZmodemControls which look great. However when you actually get your grubby hands on it, it doesn’t work right. You can go into the collection and define the tabs and all that jazz, but the control has a bad habit of reverting back to it’s empty self, losing all your configuration. I even hand coded the menu collection (rather than using the collection editor) but after reloading the page the component (or VS.NET, or both?) just decided to blow everything away. Hmmm. That’s just not right.

There’s a great one here, that looks exactly like what I want. It’s in all JavaScript. Ugh. For an ASP.NET application, that’s just not right either.